A CHASTENED RESPONSE TO JD

On Sunday last, I posted some sarcastic remarks about the NY TIMES Op Ed column by Ross Douthat.  Rather than respond in kind, JD penned a thoughtful defense of Douthat that rather put my cheap shots to shame.  I think JD deserves a serious response.  Let me begin by reprinting JD's comment, which, in my opinion, makes a better case for Douthat than Douthat made for himself.  Herewith JD:

"It seems like a rather coherent column to me; a form is readily discernible. I'm not equipped to comment on the issue he takes with Piketty's economic analysis– his criticism is brief, and it's likely you could answer it much better than I can say whether it is true or false.

However, his point is clear. In fact, his point is only a suggestion (a suggestion, however, that he clearly takes to be the case): a neglected victim of capitalism's destruction has been the cultural and spiritual resources which past generations have relied on and which are counted as some of the dearest fruits of civilized societies. He is suggesting that these goods are more imminently threatened than even economic equality and that the left, due to a neglect of questions of spiritual care and the importance of shared culture, has failed to see this and so even presently fails to have a clear view of the crisis of our times. He is suggesting not just a crisis of means but a crisis of values, ethos and community sustaining mythos. He is chalking up some of the right's recent successes to its ability (if only in rhetoric) to tap into these insecurities and fears that we are losing, or have mostly lost, the spiritual and cultural goods which give money and means more than their base, sub-human value."

 

This is an eloquent statement of an old, familiar, and honorable tradition in political theory, a tradition that has a right to claim for itself the adjective "conservative."  The Myth of the Golden Past is, of course, as old as Western Civilization, but the particular form of it that JD invokes was born in the late eighteenth century as a reaction to the rise of what eventually became known as capitalism.  Marx correctly observed that capitalism is the most revolutionary force ever unleashed on the world.  In eighteenth and nineteenth century England, and a bit later on the Continent, it undermined the authority and the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, transformed London and the other great cities of England, ate away at and finally destroyed the age-old division between city and countryside, and threw up a class of New Men who, in a single generation, without family  connections or landed estates, became unimaginably wealthy.

Speaking broadly, there were three thoughtful responses to this phenomenon.  The first was the response of those who were called Liberals, writers who celebrated the changes and wrote confidently that the manifest evils of the young capitalism -- urban slums, brutal factory work, an economic cycle of booms and busts -- were merely the growing pains of a brave new world,  soon to be replaced by a stable order of endless growth.  The second response was that of the Socialists, who welcomed the destruction of the old order but insisted that the chaos of capitalism must be replaced by rational management for the common good.  Marx was not the first to voice this vision.  He was simply the most brilliant and the most penetrating in his anatomization of the inner exploitative structure of capitalism.

The third response, which appeared in England and France as early as the end of the eighteenth century, was that of Conservatives.  There were many observers of the passing scene who looked with horror on the destruction wrought by capitalism, seeing it not as a force for growth and liberation but rather as the enemy of all they held dear.  I do not think I will elicit much protest from my brethren on the right if I say that greatest among these voices was that of Edmund Burke.  In 1797, Burke wrote an impassioned response to the events in France under the title Reflections on the Revolution in France.  Let  me quote at length the most famous passage from that seminal work, for it says eloquently what Douthat was reaching for and what JD very nicely summarized.  Here is Burke, answering the claims of the social contract theorists of his day.  I have highlighted the portion of the passage that is most often quoted:

"Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by consent or force; but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow."

The England whose loss Burke was lamenting was in fact a land of servitude and grinding poverty for the many and inherited wealth, leisure, elegance, and culture for the few.  But that was not an image worthy of Burke's eloquent invocation.  It was at roughly at this time that there was born the fantasy of Merrie Old England, a time of maypole dances and madrigals, of soft summers and manageable winters, of simple pleasures blessed by a benevolent Church.  [Not by Burke, by the way!]

This is the sensibility to which Douthat is appealing, and in his column, it is thoroughly disingenuous and dishonest.  First of all, Douthat is not harking back to medieval England, or even Colonial America.  His Golden Age transparently is the Fifties, a world in which the  Roman Catholic Mass was still celebrated in Latin and Rosie the Riveter had turned her tools over to returning servicemen and had gone back to the kitchen, a world in which June and Ward Cleaver slept in separate beds and had sex only the requisite two times to produce Wally and The Beaver.  It happens also to be a time, as Piketty shows us, in which wealth was, temporarily, less unequally distributed than it had been earlier and would be later, a time of rapid economic growth to replace what had been lost in the depression and war years.

But of course Douthat's American version of Merrie Old England was also a time of quasi-slavery for African-Americans, of back street abortions and stifled ambitions for the female half of the population, a time of the closet for gay and lesbian men and women.  Douthat neither cares about nor bothers to recall these unpleasant facts, and I rather imagine does not even consider  them truly unpleasant.

When all is said and done, what is Douthat's column really about?  Quite simply, he is worried that Piketty might encourage people to take away some of the great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few and spread it around to those whose labor actually created it.  And along the way, they might once again take notice of the role played by the Church in blessing and sanctifying the exploitation of working men and women.

That, or something like it, is what was in my mind when I penned my cheap shots at Douthat.  I apologize to JD for not taking the time to spell it all out, and I thank him or her for recalling me to my better self.